Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health

DEATH

BY

FOOD

PYRAMID

DENISE MINGER

© 2013, Denise Minger. All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, reproduction or utilization of this work in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, and in any information storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission of the publisher.

Mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities in this book does not imply endorsement by the author or publisher. Information in this book was accurate at the time researched. The author received no incentives or compensation to promote the item recommendations in the book.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918123

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher

Minger, Denise 1987-

Death by Food Pyramid/Denise Minger

ISBN: 978-0-9847551-3-4

1. Nutrition 2. Food Industry & Trade 3. Politics 4. Food Habits

Editor: Jessica Taylor Tudzin

Proofreader: Marion Warren

Design and Layout: Caroline De Vita

Cover Design: Caroline De Vita and Janée Meadows

Publisher: Primal Blueprint Publishing.

23805 Stuart Ranch Rd. Suite 145 Malibu, CA 90265

For information on quantity discounts, please call 888-774-6259,

email: info@primalblueprint.com, or visit PrimalBlueprintPublishing.com.

DISCLAIMER

The ideas, concepts, and opinions expressed in this book are intended to be used for educational purposes only. This book is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not rendering medical advice of any kind, nor is this book intended to replace medical advice, nor to diagnose, prescribe, or treat any disease, condition, illness, or injury. It is imperative that before beginning any diet program, including any aspect of the diet methodologies mentioned in Death by Food Pyramid, you receive full medical clearance from a licensed physician. The author and publisher claim no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the material in this book. If you object to this disclaimer, you may return the book to publisher for a full refund.

TO MY PARENTS,

Sue and David Minger,

who give me more love than

I know what to do with.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Chris Masterjohn, PhD

Prologue

Introduction

PART I: SHADY POLITICS

  1. Pyramid Is the New Paradigm

  2. Design by Committee

  3. Amber Waves of Shame

PART II: SLIPPERY SCIENCE

  4. Evaluating the Experts

  5. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Nutritional Research

  6. Reopening the Case Against Saturated Fat

  7. Ancel Keys and the Diet-Heart Hypothesis

  8. A Little Town in Massachusetts

  9. PUFA-rama: The Rise of Vegetable Oils

10. Meet Your Meat

11. Herbivore’s Dilemma

PART III: NEW GEOMETRY

12. A Future Informed by the Past

Afterword

Notes

List of Tables

List of Figures

Index

Acknowledgments

On any hunt for understanding, no (wo)man is an island. This book wouldn’t exist without the collective brainpower, intellectual courage, and ceaseless dedication of others in the field—many of whom are tour de forces in their own right, giants both emerging and established. It’s on these shoulders that this book, and the messages within it, can stand.

I’d like to thank a few shining stars who were particularly helpful in bringing Death by Food Pyramid into existence—whether by directly contributing to its birth, or by helping me stay sane long enough to deliver it.

To my gifted editor, Jessica Taylor Tudzin—without whom I’d be on my eight-hundredth rewrite of the first sentence. Thank you for your patience, your guidance, your wisdom, and your relentlessness in shattering my pathological perfectionism. Also to Mark Sisson, Brad Kearns, and the rest of the Primal Blueprint Publishing team—for the opportunity to write this book and fulfill a dream. A special thank you to Caroline De Vita for crafting this book’s interior layout and to Janée Meadows for the cover design.

To Luise Light, for your courage and your legacy. Marion Nestle, Nick Mottern, Joel D. Goldstrich, Gary Taubes, Lierre Keith, Carol Tucker-Foreman, Susan Welsh, Fran Cronin, Anne Shaw, Sally Fallon, and Sara Light: thank you for generously offering your time for interviews and historical insights. And to Stephen Guyenet, Paul Jaminet, Chris Kresser, and Emily Deans, whose written work has been invaluable for piecing together the nutritional puzzles explored within these pages.

A special note of thanks goes to Dr. Chris Masterjohn for offering extensive feedback as this book evolved, sharing the impossible reams of knowledge in your brain, and being the epitome of a true scientist.

To my friend Lazarus Kauffman for reminding me to breathe.

And to my beautiful family, for intermittently housing me, feeding me, and forcing me to go to bed once in awhile.

Foreword

BACK IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, several of my colleagues and old friends independently sent me links to a comprehensive and scathing critique of The China Study, a treatise cherished by the vegetarian and vegan communities for its condemnation of animal foods. The hard-hitting critique was my first encounter with Denise Minger’s brilliant work.

Five years earlier I had written my own critique of The China Study. This was years before earning my doctorate in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Connecticut and beginning my career as a professional research scientist at the University of Illinois. I was just twenty-three years old at the time, fresh out of college. I had spent two of my undergraduate years as a vegetarian and later as a vegan, strictly excluding meat, fish, dairy, and eggs from my diet, believing such an extreme diet would be more healthful, ecologically sustainable, and ethically sound than one that included animal products.

Contrary to all my expectations, my health actually worsened in a multitude of ways, only to regain its ground once I began eating high-quality, nutrient-dense animal foods. My critique of The China Study, which advocated the very diet that proved in my own experience to be so crippling, was the second article I had written about health and nutrition. I have since written hundreds more, published in Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and on my web site, Cholesterol-And-Health.Com, as well as other progressive health blogs such as Mother Nature Obeyed and The Daily Lipid. As of this writing, I have also published seven articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and have been invited to give thirty public lectures on nutritional topics, focused especially on my unique ideas about how nutrients interact in complex ways to promote health.

In one of the most recent of such events, my troubling experience with veganism—an experience I share in common with Denise—again came to the fore. The producers of America’s leading debate series, Intelligence Squared, invited me to debate the promises and perils of veganism in front of a live audience, moderated by ABC News Correspondent John Donvan, broadcast live on over 220 National Public Radio (NPR) stations. I joined forces for the debate with Joel Salatin, a pioneer of pasture-based farming featured prominently in Michael Pollan’s bestselling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Together we challenged Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, and Dr. Neal Barnard, president and founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). The advisory board for PCRM features none other than T. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, author of the book that Denise and I had both challenged near the beginning of our writing careers: The China Study.

From 2005 to 2010, my critique of The China Study was one of a small handful of go-to articles serving as essential reading for anyone seeking a critical analysis of the book. Once Denise released her much more extensive critique in the summer of 2010, however, it became clear that my review had served its purpose and that its time in the spotlight had come and gone. I was so wrapped up in my doctoral studies at the time that days passed between first receiving a flurry of emails urging me to read her new analysis and finally laying eyes on it. But once I began reading it, I could hardly wrest my eyes from the screen or peel my jaw from the floor.

It was clear that for every hour I had put into my own analysis, Denise had put in at least twelve. Yet the long hours that had obviously gone into her analysis were hardly its most impressive features. Few people have the creative brilliance and sheer analytical prowess that Denise has, and yet fewer have the dedication it takes to fashion a work of such monumental proportions. What makes Denise’s writing not simply of rare and precious quality but truly unique, however, is her unmatched ability to imbue even her most scientifically rigorous writing with simplicity and lighthearted humor. Whether ingeniously crafted or the unconscious imprint left by her own glowingly positive and charitable disposition, Denise’s signature style leaves the reader feeling not only more educated and perhaps even a bit smarter, but having smiled and laughed just enough to make the world seem like a more hopeful and cheerful place in which to carry on.

I first met Denise at the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2011, where she spoke about The China Study and I spoke about heart disease. I have since had the privilege to present alongside her at four other conferences, through which I have also gained the honor of her invaluable personal friendship. Demand for Denise’s public lectures took off far more rapidly than demand for mine had, which is hardly surprising when one considers the rapidity with which her Internet presence soared.

In the wake of her blockbuster China Study analysis, Denise launched a series of blog posts tackling faddish phobias of foods ranging from fruit to fat. She deconstructed dietary dogmatism from such disparate sources as the thoroughly unconventional, pro-vegan documentary Forks Over Knives to the very prototype of conventional wisdom itself, the USDA Dietary Guidelines.

She even challenged inaccuracies that had undeservingly reached fact status in the dietary communities that most supported her initial rise to Internet fame, such as the myth popular in low-carb, paleo, and ancestral health circles that Ancel Keys completely fabricated the correlation between animal fat and national heart disease rates by cherry-picking his data out of a larger pool of numbers where no such correlation existed.

Through her writings, Denise has earned a reputation for honesty, objectivity, integrity, and a healthy capacity for self-criticism. With this reputation came an audience eager to see these qualities manifest live at the podium with all the intellectual rigor and entertaining humor we have come to expect from this rising star—and an audience just as eager to read her first book.

On every front, Death by Food Pyramid delivers. Tours through the histories of the food pyramid, the decline of animal fats, and the rise of hydrogenated vegetable oils provide the reader with a fascinating feast of facts. Self-help guides for reading scientific studies and easy-to-read yet academically rigorous deconstructions of some of the key studies that have shaped our modern views of health and nutrition render the reader feeling a bit smarter, more academically confident, and better intellectually equipped than before.

Readers looking for practical dietary advice will enjoy Denise’s tips about how to cook meat properly and balance it with critical synergistic foods, her recommendations about how to reap the benefits of vegetarianism without excluding meat, and her distillation of the key commonalities among the wildly different traditional diets associated with vibrant health and modern dietary approaches associated with clinical success.

Denise situates controversial historical figures like Ancel Keys in context and evaluates dietary approaches as disparate as plant-based and paleo with a rarely achieved level of honesty and objectivity. While the titular topic of death and the disease it invariably implies may seem dim or even grim, Denise infuses each chapter with a touch of her characteristic humor and concludes the book with an empowering plan of attack to win back the right to a healthy future. As a result, the reader is bound to enjoy a large handful of chuckles and walk away with a renewed sense of hope.

Death by Food Pyramid is as much a criticism of the pyramid paradigm as it is of the pyramid itself. After all, the long-dominant food pyramid is now defunct, but the paradigm underlying it endures. The size and shape of the pyramid and its compartments, as well as the certainty and inflexibility of its proclamations, reflect the negotiations and machinations of competing economic interests, the zealousness of researchers promoting their own pet hypotheses, the inflated confidence among policy makers who fail to appreciate the limits of scientific studies, and the underappreciated roles of context and individuality.

Readers hoping for a tract in defense of some equally overconfident and inflexible alternative to the pyramid will not find what they are looking for. They will find something far better. In Death by Food Pyramid, Denise continues using the same critical approach she used in the summer of 2010 in her now-famous deconstruction of The China Study, but she uses it as a bulwark against unfounded dietary dogmatism coming from every angle. Within these pages, Denise has crafted an approach that nurtures a profound appreciation of scientific humility in a way that empowers each of us to harness not only what we know, but even what we don’t know, to achieve vibrant health in the here and now, and to make that health our gift to the future.

Chris Masterjohn, PhD

October 2013

Urbana, IL

Death by Food Pyramid

Prologue

IT WAS THE CLOSING DECADE of the twentieth century, a time to ring out the old and bring in the new. A time to shift the message from eat more to eat less, to trim the waistline of a country that once considered skinny an insult, to unclog arteries and outwit cancer. It was time for a change. It was time, the government knew, to replace the outdated Basic Four food guide that had been circulating since the 1950s. It was time for the solid, enduring image of a pyramid.

By April 1991, the fruit of the USDA’s labor was ripe. Three years of drafting and testing had culminated with the Eating Right Pyramid—a symbol designed to convey, at a glance, that Americans should cut down on fat and load up on grains. One million copies were due for distribution by the end of the month. With nothing standing between the pyramid and the eager public except a few last-minute color adjustments, the new guide was almost ready for its grand unveiling. But thanks to political fanfare and a dash of Murphy’s Law, those plans were about to change. What happened next turned a federal project into a national soap opera.

Now officially retired, the USDA food pyramid endures as part of the national consciousness, representing more than just a set of government-approved food guidelines, but the culmination of big business, shady politics, and slippery science. Its lingering influence serves as a reminder of the regurgitated, spoon-fed advice most of us grew up hearing but few have dared examine. Until now.

Introduction

MOST OF US DON’T START paying attention to our diet—much less diving deeper than the wading-pool zone of nutritional science—until something forcefully shoves us there. Sometimes it’s the realization that our fat day pants no longer make it past our hips. Sometimes it’s the grim prescription for statins. Sometimes it’s a loved one’s coronary bypass, an under-skin lump where no lump should be, or that sobering moment when we graduate college and realize that ramen and Mountain Dew aren’t actually food groups.

In my case, my first foray into the health world was a cursory one: I just wanted to make it through a day without my sinuses simulating Niagara Falls. But even with wheat, dairy, and soy allergies that furiously rebelled against normal cuisine and left me with ceaseless congestion, I never considered that the food pyramid—and the dietary guidelines I’d copied onto flashcards during ninth-grade Health Ed—could be anything less than pristine for everyone else.

After all, this stuff was designed by experts. People who’d survived years of rigorous grad school. Scientists. Doctors. Biochemists. Geniuses. Entire troops of grown-up Doogie Howsers. Who was I to question their wisdom?

Though my faith in white coats would eventually crumble, I started in the same place most people do: a state of blissful ignorance. We grow up thinking nutrition is a fine-tuned science—one carefully guarded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Dietetic Association, the US Department of Agriculture, and other big-name authorities with clout and confidence far beyond our own. We spend our lives soaking up their ubiquitous advice, filing it away in the brain cabinet where true things go.

Saturated fat clogs your arteries.

Whole grains are heart-healthy.

Lowfat dairy makes your bones strong.

White meat is better than red.

Vegetable oils are healthier than butter.

High-cholesterol foods cause heart disease.

In most cases, we can’t pinpoint where we first heard these things—we just know they must be right. The same little voice insisting breakfast is the most important meal of the day also tells us oatmeal is healthier than a three-egg scramble. We instinctively reach for the lowfat yogurt over its full-fat counterpart, knowing that extra layer of cream would go straight to our hips (unless it set up camp in our arteries first). We practically feel our aortas sigh with relief when we pass on the steak and order a salad drenched in balsamic vinaigrette.

Taken together, all these truisms congeal into a glob of so-called conventional wisdom—an inventory of beliefs so widespread that we no longer bother questioning them.

That all changed for me in my sophomore year of high school. During a covert attempt to pilfer Radiohead songs from the Internet, I ended up in unfamiliar cyber territory: an alternative health website dedicated to the 80/10/10 Diet—a lowfat, raw vegan program promoted by chiropractor Doug Graham. The number sequence referred to the diet’s macronutrient ratios: 80 percent carbohydrate, 10 percent fat, and 10 percent protein.

For me, this was a once in a blue moon experience, the kind of thing we encounter that makes us question our beliefs. The terrible moment Santa stops existing. The death of the tooth fairy. The realization that teachers don’t actually live at school. Usually we’ve spent up these epiphanies well before adolescence, but what I found on that website proved otherwise. In front of me lay the startling claim that cooked foods, the very foundation of the human cuisine, were the root of modern disease.

Slack-jawed and intrigued, I plowed through pages of arguments and testimonials that—to my teenage mind—seemed entirely convincing. Our true human diet, I read, should resemble the high-carb cuisine our primate cousins ate: a feast of fruit and greens, untouched by fire, spices, salts, seasonings, oils, or anything else inhabiting most standard pantries.

People were reportedly losing weight and curing their diabetes, cancer, obesity, asthma, heart disease, and existential crises all by defying our prevailing beliefs about food and going raw. Bananas and spinach were the new mac n’ cheese. Cooked beans? Their life force was gone. Boiled eggs? Heated protein was denatured—a word I couldn’t actually define at the time, but it sure sounded bad.

We’re the only species that cooks our food, the website’s author told me, and the only species plagued with chronic illnesses. The evidence seemed compelling. And having already been a vegetarian since the age of seven—spurred by a traumatic experience nearly choking on a piece of steak—I was only a few egg-white omelets away from veganism anyhow. To my opened eyes, the bowl of popcorn I’d been snacking on suddenly looked like a pile of lethal sludge nuggets.

It wasn’t long before I abandoned every ounce of food pyramid faith I’d once harbored. After all, I was already allergic to half of its tiers. And despite the USDA’s insistence that we eat our six-to-eleven servings of grains each day to stay healthy, none of those raw vegans, with their bright eyes and glowing skin, seemed to be dying of a bread deficiency. I’d fallen under the spell that seduces so many health voyagers: the power of unsubstantiated anecdote and well-posed before-and-after pictures.

I soon entered the lowfat, raw vegan diet with great fanfare. As usually happens when a pathological overachiever embarks on a new project, I followed all the rules—and then added some of my own, just for the sake of gratuitous pain. Breakfast was fruit. Lunch was fruit. Dinner was a pile of leafy greens … with fruit. I perfected the art of downing half-gallon smoothies in one sitting and eating entire heads of lettuce plain. And I was told—by Internet strangers masquerading as anthropologists—that this frugivorous menu was nutritionally adequate and scientifically optimal for Homo sapiens sapiens. After all, the brain and body operates on sugar, right? I spent the next twelve months eating enough bananas to feed a Congo jungle’s worth of monkeys.

It didn’t take long before I realized why raw vegans were so eager to flood the Internet with tales of their miraculous healing. In a matter of weeks, problems I didn’t even know I’d had began disappearing. I no longer crawled out of bed in the morning; I launched, NASA style. I had the manic energy of an eight year old after a Skittles binge. I started running—even when nothing was chasing me. I stopped catching colds. My skin cleared up. I’m pretty sure some freckles even fell off. Monty Python be damned; I’d found the Holy Grail!

Like most things in life, everything was great—until it wasn’t.

One of the first lessons you learn as a raw vegan is how to convince yourself that symptoms of malnourishment are actually good things. During my daily perusal of a message board dedicated to the 80/10/10 Diet, I discovered that my understanding of health was grossly distorted. To the uninformed, it might seem alarming that I shivered uncontrollably in 70-degree weather—but as the self-appointed raw-food gurus explained, it really just meant I was detoxing. My rapid loss of muscle mass was necessary for purging old, toxin-contaminated cells. Ditto for the fistfuls of hair I was shedding in the shower. And best of all, my inability to focus on anything in front of me was helpful for staying centered in the present moment, thus expediting my path to enlightenment.

As the months rolled on, I increasingly looked like I’d just crawled out of a low-budget zombie film. Doctor visits ensued. And with those, more knee-jerk excuses when my blood test results came back out of range. Normal values are averaged from unhealthy Americans who eat Big Macs, I contended, parroting what I’d been told online. They don’t apply to raw vegans.

There was only one thing that could pop my bubble of denial: the whetted tip of a dental probe.

Say Ahh

It all changed that ill-fated November when I found myself walking through the doors of my dentist’s office. A full year of raw veganism had come to a wrap. I was seventeen: thinner, paler, clumsier, and less capable of forming a coherent sentence than I’d been at any other point in my existence. San Francisco couldn’t hold a candle to all the fog in my brain. But I believed, deep down in my fruit-fueled heart, that health was something you simply knew you had, even if you couldn’t feel it or see it.

The visit began as usual. Stepford Wife-esque receptionists working the front desk. Ten minutes of pretending to read an old issue of People. Smiling hygienists. The buzz of the X-ray machine. And finally, a firm handshake from my dentist. A blend of gangsta and Midwesterner suffering a midlife crisis, he bore a graying ponytail and, hanging from his neck, a gold cross big enough for a real-life crucifixion.

After a few minutes in the chair, I could tell something wasn’t quite right. Instead of the immediate praise I’d come to expect upon sight of my meticulously maintained chompers, there was silence. He offered nothing but a few disconcerting hmms and heavy sighs as he skimmed his mirror across my molars.

With his latex-coated fingers still shoved in my mouth, I tried asking what was wrong.

Wuh’s wahn?

Another sigh. Another hmm. Another 80-decible heartbeat in my chest. And then it came.

I’ve never seen teeth like this on someone so young, he finally announced, jabbing my bicuspids in resignation. Rampant decay everywhere.

Even my dentist’s devotional bling wasn’t enough to soften the blow. By the time he tallied up the sixteenth cavity, I was already imagining a complete mouth transplant.

Little did I suspect at the time, my teeth had likely fallen victim to a deficiency of fat-soluble vitamins—which, despite America’s calcium fixation, are some of the most critical players in all things bone. (We’ll come back to these issues in depth in the New Geometry section.) My mind, however, was too stunned to summon any thoughts of vitamins and minerals right then. I’d been slapped with the latex glove of reality. Mistakes had been made. Decay had been formed. And in one fell swoop, I’d been awakened from my lowfat raw vegan fantasy.

Although the doctor insisted I’d had low levels of iron and vitamin B12, my most deadly deficiency, I would later learn, was in critical thinking.

Universal Lessons

Perhaps I would’ve fled the arms of dietary disaster sooner if I’d been older, wiser, and less blighted by the bad karma of music piracy. Maybe I would’ve kept my no-cavity bragging rights instead of spending more money on dental bills than I did on four years of college. I’ll never know for sure. But my follies—as expensive and Novocain-numbed as they were—turned out to be blessings in disguise. My experience as a raw vegan sparked what’s become a now decade-long quest to reclaim intellectual freedom, demolish bad science, and discover the truth about what we should be eating.

Even if the details differ, the shape of my story is unfortunately common. The diet world is a dangerous place for the uninitiated. When we first step into its murky, scam-infested innards, we barely realize how close we are to bonking our heads on a beam of pseudoscience, or slipping down a slope lined with wheatgrass and dihydrogen monoxide supplements. We assume, in the beginning, that The Truth has already been excavated—sitting behind bullet-proof glass somewhere, crowned by a golden nimbus—and all we have to do is find the right book or website to tell us what it is.

In many cases, we put our trust in celebrity doctors and other purveyors of conventional wisdom, diligently following their dietary lead, hoping they’ve got it right. In other cases, like mine, we stumble around until some guy in a blazer sells us a compelling story and a box of discounted mangoes.

In either situation, the outcome is the same: we end up a few miles south of real vitality, stranded with our damaged goods and the unshakable feeling we’ve just been swindled. Unable to navigate the nutrition terrain on our own, we stumble blindly—maybe with a ketchup-stained Rand McNally tucked under one